


Cataclysm

by thepalequeen



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Developing Relationship, F/M, Medical Procedures, references to multiple episodes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-04
Updated: 2016-11-04
Packaged: 2018-08-29 00:16:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8468512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepalequeen/pseuds/thepalequeen
Summary: A J/C story, also featuring P/T, Harry Kim and others, set at the beginning of Voyager's eighth year in space. This ignores bits of season 7 and rearranges other parts. I think Voyager might have been much better if 24th century medicine had been less like pure magic and the ship had not had the luxury of near-infinite resources — this story explores that prospect.





	

**Author's Note:**

> To some extent, this is a reaction against the casual attitude towards the prospect of losing life and limb in _Unimatrix Zero_. I also think a small ship equipped for a six-week mission should have been in more trouble for lack of resources on a long, unplanned journey than Voyager often was. In these respects, this draws inspiration from _Year of Hell_. I was keen to preserve Voyager's sense of isolation; hence the nonchalance with which I cut their line of communication to the Alpha Quadrant.
> 
>  **Timeline:** Towards the end of season 7 or towards the beginning of Voyager’s eighth year in the Delta Quadrant. However, this plays fast and loose with the events of seasons 6 and 7, acting like some things never happened (making it home, C/7, Neelix’s departure), and rearranging the timeline for others (B’Elanna’s pregnancy is set slightly later, for instance, and communication with Starfleet as set up in _Life Line_ and developed in _Author, Author_ is treated as a single event).

 

**Cataclysm**

She would remember the day, in retrospect, like a slap. An assault on her senses.

There was sound –

“Weapons fire on the ground,” Tuvok said from Tactical.

Before she could react, Harry’s voice came over the comm. “Kim to Voyager, two to beam directly to sickbay.” His voice was too loud, panicked, keeping it together just short of a wail.

“We have them, Captain,” Ayala confirmed from Ops almost immediately.

Janeway gave him a nod and whirled around to direct Paris to lay in a course out of there, but the Doctor beat her to it. “Mr Paris, I need you down here,” he intoned urgently from sickbay.

There was a scream, then, transmitted through the still open comm channel. Not Harry.

Chakotay … though it sounded hardly like him. It was a crazed animal sound, the likes of which she had heard only once before, when she’d been a science officer and she’d been made to listen to her mentor, Owen Paris, being tortured by the Cardassians. It set her teeth on edge. She felt as though the bridge was spinning around her, faster and faster, out of control.

Then Tom sprinted to the turbo lift and her own reflexes kicked in. “Mr. Ayala, take the conn. Plot a course out of here via the Mtåro sector, maximum warp.”

“Ay, Captain.”

The whirl of the warp engines sprang up at Ayala’s touch of the console, and then the stars were streaming past the viewscreen.

“Any sign of pursuit?” she asked.

“Negative,” Tuvok said. “No spaceborne vessels within eighteen light years and none taking off from the planetoid. At current course and speed, we’ll reach the edges of the Mtåro sector in two hours twenty-nine minutes.”

“Good. Go to yellow alert. Keep current course and speed until we reach the sector, then drop to warp six.”

“Ay.”

“I guess we’ll have to take the scenic route,” she finished grimly.

Retreating to friendlier space. They had made contact with the Įmtåru who inhabited that vast sector three days ago. They had warned Voyager about the possibility of marauding bands of Êetæk, an infamously reclusive and violent species, on their planned course, but the route Seven had charted cut a hundred and sixty light years off their journey and traversed a string of planetoids rich with dilithium deposits. Their dilithium supply was critical. Janeway had reasoned that they had survived far worse than some alien marauders and, in any case, if they were forced to shut down the warp core, they’d be dead in the water. She’d been more worried about the prospect of travelling another 30,000 light years at impulse than she had been about the away team's safety when she’d sent Harry and Chakotay on a scouting mission to one of those planetoids.

She sat, checked her own console and tried to project calm. Willed herself to ignore the rising panic. That scream. Chakotay…

After a few minutes had passed without further incident, she stood. “I’ll be in sickbay. Maintain yellow alert.” She thought she heard an uncomfortable collective intake of breath among the bridge crew as she strode with measured steps towards the turbo lift. But perhaps she was imagining things.

The moment she tripped the sensor to enter sickbay, there was smell —

It was thick, cloying, the heady stench of blood. It hit her before her eyes could register the sight in front of her.

Smell was the sense most dulled in space. The ship’s environmental filters were highly efficient at purifying the air. The scent of a hot cup of coffee would waft up, but not linger. Even Neelix’s pungent cooking left no lasting mark. In the earliest days of spaceflight, before artificial gravity, Earth’s astronauts used to complain of feeling perpetually congested. That wasn’t the case now, of course, but for all the fond associations of home and belonging that the ship held for its crew, Voyager was an olfactorily sterile environment.

What struck her in the split second before she was able to take in the sight that greeted her, was how little people bled. There were cuts and bruises of course, occasional phaser wounds, but field medics could usually quell the stream of blood before people even made it to sickbay. She couldn’t remember a time when the medical bay had smelled anything but neutral, that clean, vaguely antiseptic smell. 

It was different now. That smell was like walking into a wall of copper. An onslaught of the organic against the technological. She thought she might retch, and then — there was sight — 

There was red, blood red, and it was everywhere. Smeared on the biobeds, pooling on the floor, beneath the bed where Tom and the Doctor were frantically working on the unconscious Chakotay. A fine spray of it had hit the wall behind them. Harry was sitting out of the way, two biobeds over. He was pale, unmoving, and cradled one arm to his chest. There was a smear of blood on his forehead, which he must have swiped with the bloodied arm.

“We’re losing him!” Tom said. He sounded fraught but did not look up from where he was assisting the Doctor.

“Replicate another transfusion, he’s going into hypovolemic shock,” the Doctor said. Forceful, but calm.

Tom moved swiftly over to the medical replicator. Janeway could see that the front of his uniform was wet with blood, his hands covered in it. His fingertips left red prints on the replicator buttons and he took the replicated container back to the biobed. His shoes added to the bloody footprints already on the floor. If he’d noticed that she had come in, he gave no indication of it.

Janeway sat next to Harry on the biobed, squeezed the shoulder of his good arm.

“Captain.” His voice was raspy.

She noticed, then, that the arm he was holding was bound with a tourniquet, and above the tourniquet, where the hand should have been, there was nothing.

“Harry.” She moved her own arm around his shoulders and he seemed to slump a little at her touch.

“Captain, we never saw them coming — we — they just started shooting at us, and they had some sort of vaporizing weapons —”

His speech was slightly slurred and slow and he was staring straight ahead, as if he wasn’t really talking to her. He was in shock, and she thought they must have given him an analgesic, and probably a mild sedative, to keep him out of the way while they worked on Chakotay.

“It’s all right, Harry.” She squeezed his shoulders, and he shivered a little as they sat and waited while the Doctor and Tom worked to resolve the triage situation that meant that Harry’s hand had to wait until Chakotay’s life was either saved or lost.

His vaporized hand.

Some part of her mind observed her own curious lack of surprise as, with strange deliberation, she turned her attention back to the other biobed. The Doctor took a sideways step to retrieve an instrument from the medical tray. She must have already known, she realised, at least in some less-than-fully-conscious part of her mind, behind the overwhelming sight of the blood and the suffocating smell, the cause of it.

She must have already registered it on some level, because when she saw it, now, really took in the extent of Chakotay’s injuries for the first time, she didn’t feel a jolt of shock at all, just a slow sinking feeling deep in her stomach that would not leave her for a very long time.

Both Chakotay’s hands, she thought she could see, unlike Harry’s, were intact.

Funny, this ingrained tendency to take stock of what was left to work with before focusing on what was lost. It was a habit instilled in command training and cemented over years of fighting battles, rationing scarce resources and making miraculous escapes.

Chakotay’s head, arms, hands and torso, then, all looked unharmed. But it was where his torso ended, from where his legs should have been, that the blood flowed liberally onto the biobed and from there onto the floor in a steady drip.

The right leg appeared to have been amputated below the knee, and like Harry’s arm, it had been bound with a tourniquet. As for the left, she could not make out quite how close to his hip it had been severed, because the Doctor and Tom were leaning over the injury, intently waving their instruments in an attempt to stop the hemorrhaging. Their movements were quick and controlled, and they spoke but syllables to each other.

“Subdermal scalpel,” the Doctor said, and Tom handed him the instrument.

“Anabolic plaser.”

“Tri-laser connector.”

It went like that for a while, in a rhythmic sequence of the Doctor’s commands, energy beams, and the clattering of discarded instruments hitting the medical tray. It might have been thirty minutes, an hour, or more, before the med team’s movements seemed to be gradually becoming less rushed.

Finally the Doctor said, “autosuture” and then “dermal regenerator” and after another few minutes he stepped back, looking serious but satisfied. “That should do it for now.”

Tom nodded.

“We’ll have to keep him under anaesthetic for a couple of days, but he shouldn’t need to be put in stasis.”

As the Doctor turned to Harry’s injury, gently helping the shell-shocked Ensign lie down, Janeway approached Chakotay’s biobed. He had never looked so pale. His skin was grey and his body unmoving, still sticky with his own spilled blood. She looked down to where his legs should have been and weren’t, then quickly back up at his face.

Tom moved to stand by her side. “Kathryn,” he said.

“Will he be all right?” she asked. She thought her knees might buckle.

Tom held her biceps in a gentle grip. His hands, she noticed, were no longer stained with blood.

“He’ll live,” he said.

 

——— 

 

**1 day earlier**

“I don’t even know you anymore!” Harry protested, in a frantic whisper. He and Tom were standing by the replicators in the mess hall, and Harry’s tone was somewhere between put-upon frustration and eager curiosity. Like the teacher’s pet whose deepest fear is someone else being singled out, Tom thought.

“Look, Harry, I’ll see you tomorrow. 1800 hours, Holodeck Two. Don’t be late. Besides, if I actually told you, I think your head might explode.”

Harry’s eyes went wide. “So it is true — I don’t believe it!”

“What are you even talking about?”

“I heard it from Megan Delaney who says Jen saw the two of them on the way to your quarters just a couple of weeks ago. I told her she had to be mistaken because there is _no way_ my best buddy Tom would be keeping something like _that_ from me.”

“Yeah, I still don’t get what you’re—”

“But now you say you have to go, again, and you don’t want dinner, again, and you’re replicating a bottle of wine, again, and I know it’s not just date night with B’Elanna because she can’t drink, obviously, and I have to say—”

“Harry—,” Tom looked around, not keen to attract attention to this particular conversation. A group of stellar cartography staff were having dinner across the room and Chapman and Ashmore were milling about at the food counter, talking to Neelix. No one seemed to be paying Tom and Harry any mind.

“—this really takes the cake!”

“Harry, you’re making this into way more than it actually is.”

“So then it is true?”

Tom sighed. If he refused to admit it, he’d just be making it worse. “Why don’t you tell me what you think and I’ll either confirm or deny?”

“Okay,” Harry began, flushed with eagerness, “have you and B’Elanna, or have you not, been having private dinners with the Captain and Chakotay?”

Bullseye. Word travelled fast on Voyager, they said. Warp ten.

He rolled his eyes. “I can’t believe you people waste your time speculating about that.”

“Confirm or deny, Tom, confirm or deny.”

“Fine. Uhm, I guess, confirm.”

A mixture of intense delight and even more intense jealousy lit up Harry’s face. Tom chuckled. “And you wonder why people speculate about the evolution of Tom Paris from ex-con and incorrigible ladies’ man to married and cohabiting and, now, wining and dining with the Captain?”

“Hey! We happen to enjoy each other’s company!” A lame retort if there ever was one, and he knew it.

“Oh, sure, the Captain enjoys— that, really—”

“No, this isn’t— For god’s sake, Harry, don’t— I meant the four of us, me and B’Elanna and Chakotay and Ka— the Captain.”

“Kathryn! You were going to— She let’s you call her Kathryn?!”

“Look, Harry, I don’t know what to tell you. And this isn’t a secret, exactly. They’re just dinners. And, I mean, they’ve never said not to tell anyone, but I just get the feeling they’d rather be discreet about it, which is why I haven’t been spreading it around. And I’m sure the Captain would appreciate it if you wouldn’t either.” It wasn’t that Tom didn’t enjoy needling Harry, but enough was enough. Besides, he was running late.

“Yeah, yeah, you know me, Tom, my lips are sealed. But this is just— wow, I’m so jealous!”

Tom smirked at him, but the conversation was starting to make him uncomfortable. This was his best friend in the world. But Harry was a bachelor, all of thirty years old, dating here and there, ripping it up on the holodeck, and still awaiting that to his mind always surely imminent promotion to Lieutenant, despite years of evidence that Janeway considered preserving the chain of command a higher priority. Sometimes it seemed Tom’s and Harry’s lives, so intertwined on the small ship, were nonetheless moving in sharply different directions.

He turned to go.

“Wait, Tom, does this mean those rumours are true?”

“What rumours?” He sighed, knowing very well what rumours Harry was likely referring to.

“That, you know, the Captain and Chakotay … they’re an _item_?”

“I’m late.” He left, the door of the mess hall swishing shut behind him.

 

——— 

 

**2 hours later**

Laughter rang out along the table. Tom had a knowing look on his face, B’Elanna an incredulous one.

“To be fair, though, I think you were able to pull some of that because you were an admiral’s daughter,” Chakotay said, not unkindly.

Kathryn arched an eyebrow. “What part? The frenzied essay-writing all-nighters or hiding from passing captains in the rosebushes while inebriated?”

Chakotay chuckled. “Both.”

“Oh? How do you figure that?” She leaned back in her chair and gave him an expectant look.

“Because the likes of you were the kinds of cadets that used to terrify me at the Academy.”

“The likes of—”

“The Starfleet brats, who acted like they owned the place.” He regarded her over the rim of his wine glass, eyes twinkling with challenge.

“I wouldn’t say that, exactly. I hardly think the instructors gave me an easy time just because they knew who my father was. In fact, in some cases, I’d bet it was the opposite.”

“Hear, hear,” Tom concurred from across the table.

Chakotay shook his head. “I don’t mean to imply you didn’t work hard. All I’m saying is, when I arrived at the Academy, I felt spectacularly out of place. I couldn’t have imagined putting off work to go drinking. For four years I was petrified I’d be found out for a fraud.”

“But you’d been sponsored by Sulu, who himself came from an impressive ‘Fleet lineage, did he not?” Kathryn averred.

Chakotay nodded. “Sure. But there I was, sixteen, far from my home colony. My father didn’t think I belonged. I was desperate to prove him wrong, and scared stiff that he might have been right.”

“Huh. I guess I never really thought about how that would have colored the experience.”

“What do you think, B’Elanna? You were from a distant colony, with no family connection to the ‘Fleet.”

“Not to mention one of very few Klingons around,” B’Elanna agreed. “I think you’re right, Chakotay. I mean, it’s no secret that I was always questioning what I was doing there.”

“What about the pressure of letting down the family name if you don’t excel, though,” Tom said. “I wouldn’t describe my Academy days as a picnic. Hell, half the time I wanted to be anywhere but there.”

B’Elanna frowned. “I still think it’s different. I’d never even been to Earth before.”

Chakotay nodded. “Personally, I think it’s the difference between being pressured to live up to something you were taught to own, figuring out for how fast and how high you should aim, and struggling to fit in while constantly questioning if this is for you.”

“It is true that a disproportionate number of officers come from ‘Fleet families,” Kathryn agreed.

“Still, if Kathryn and I hadn’t been living it up back then, we wouldn’t be able to regale you with tales of our debauched youth now.” Tom lifted his glass in Kathryn’s direction and she clinked hers against it. 

“ _PetaQ_ ,” B’Elanna said, but she was laughing.

“I’m just glad I didn’t meet you back then,” Chakotay said, even as he rested a hand on Kathryn’s shoulder. “Hyper-ambitious cadet Janeway would have been too much for me.”

“Charming,” she said, but took his hand in hers.

Chakotay smiled at her, enjoying the easy affection. They’d been having near-fortnightly dinners with Tom and B’Elanna for the past four months, but it had only been very recently, the last two, perhaps three times, that Kathryn had seemed to allow herself to drop more of the pretence that they were the Captain and the Commander dining with the ship’s Pilot and Chief Engineer, who happened to be a married couple.

It had been at his suggestion that they’d revisited that abridged dinner Seven had cooked for the four of them in the mess hall, though he’d moved them into his quarters and replicated a few dishes from his personal database. He’d wanted to do it, because it struck him as unnatural that their relationship appeared to only exist in those moments when he and Kathryn were alone together. Tom and B’Elanna had seemed an ideal choice to expand their circle of two into — his old friend and her husband, both on the senior staff, neither hampered by an undue devotion to Starfleet protocol.

Chakotay had been glad to see how much Kathryn enjoyed these moments of being together with friends; early on, at their second dinner, for which they’d come together in Tom and B’Elanna’s quarters, she’d asked them to call her by her first name. And yet, for a naturally so tactile person, she’d been the picture of restraint where their relationship was concerned. Even now, the look she gave him held a touch of hesitancy that was quite unlike anything Voyager’s Captain normally projected.

“How about dessert?” Chakotay asked, breaking the moment. “I’ve got the replicator programmed with a Ktarian pudding.”

 

———

 

**3 days later**

“I’m such a _tohzah_ ,” B’Elanna thought grimly, as Janeway leaned back behind her desk and pinched the bridge of her nose as if to stave off a headache.

She and Tuvok were ganging up on the Captain in her ready room. Tom would've said that there was a first time for everything. B’Elanna hadn’t spoken to the Captain face-to-face since their last dinner. Tom, who’d seen her come through sickbay once, to check on the unconscious Chakotay, had told B’Elanna he didn’t think it would do any good to try to talk to Kathryn just now, that there was nothing, really, that she could say.

Still, now that she was here, and saw that Captain had this haunted look, with dark circles under her eyes and a gaze that held the weight of the world within it, B’Elanna felt guilty. Not only was she not reaching out to her friend, she was colluding with the Chief of Security to make her life more complicated.

“Captain, given our current tactical situation, it would be logical to reverse course and attempt dilithium extraction at a second planetoid,” Tuvok said.

“We’ll need to replenish our dilithium crystals in the next two weeks,” B’Elanna concurred. “If we don’t, even if we limit ourselves to minimum warp, we’ll have a hell of a time restarting the matter/antimatter reaction after the next month or so.”

“No,” Janeway said simply.

“Captain—,” B’Elanna started at the same time as Tuvok said, “In terms of risk assessment, I consider it unlikely that our efforts would be troubled by the marauders again—”

“Our scanners don’t detect them,” the Captain objected. She rose and walked over to the windows, then back to the railing that bisected her ready room.

“While that is the case, we were told they only sporadically occupy each of the twelve planetoids that make up the south belt. The likelihood of them having the element of surprise as they catch us in the line of fire is relatively small, and smaller still if we assign additional security personnel to the away team,” Tuvok said.

“There’s also a very real risk we’ll be stranded in the Mtåro sector,” B’Elanna added. “The Įmtåru have no use for dilithium so it’s not likely we’ll be able to trade with them for it.”

Janeway looked from one of them to the other. “These marauders shoot first and never ask questions at all,” she said, gesturing restlessly. Her voice was loud. She seemed barely in control of herself. B’Elanna had only seen her like this a couple of times before, once when she’d been hell-bent on finding Captain Ransom and the Equinox, another time when alien intruders had pumped up her dopamine levels as part of their so-called science experiment. B’Elanna shifted uncomfortably, feeling like she shouldn’t have come.

“Our casualty rate in encountering the Êetæk is one hundred per cent,” Janeway was saying. “We don’t know that they don’t have some kind of ability to detect our presence. If there’s any truth to the Įmtåru’s stories, the Êetæk have an uncanny ability to materialize immediately, and then shoot to kill.”

“The quality of that intelligence would seem to be anecdotal,” Tuvok said. “Legends passed on from one generation to the next. As far as we know, no Įmtåru have left their sector via the south planetoid belt for at least several decades.”

“And yet our experience conforms to the pattern they described. Harry and Chakotay barely made it out alive, and we don’t have the ability to repair the damage their weapons inflict. The answer is no, I’m not willing to expose another member of the crew to that kind of risk.”

The Captain turned her back to them, seeming to compose herself. “We’ll dock at the Įmtåru’s central trading station, take the time to make whatever repairs to the ship we can and send the Delta Flyer and a shuttle on survey missions throughout the sector.”

B’Elanna nodded. They could urge her to pursue other options again if all their efforts failed, she supposed. It would be pushing it as far as their dilithium reserve was concerned, but, then again, she could see the Captain’s point. They could afford to lose members of the crew even less than they could afford to lose their warp drive.

“It is a vast sector, and although dilithium is rare, it is not impossible we will detect hidden deposits on one of its gas giants or moons,” Tuvok conceded.

“Then we’re in agreement,” Janeway nodded curtly. “If that was all?”

B’Elanna saw an opening, an opportunity to reach out to Kathryn as a friend. Tuvok would leave and she would let her know that she was there for her, that she hadn’t meant to make a dire situation more difficult by insinuating the Captain was making the wrong decision. That she was so sorry for what had happened, that, of course, she agreed that Chakotay’s life and health were of paramount concern at the moment—

“Actually, Captain, might I have a word?” Tuvok said, interrupting B’Elanna’s train of thought. _Damn the Vulcan_. Suddenly, she was the third wheel in the room.

“Of course. Thank you, Lieutenant,” Janeway said, dismissing B’Elanna.

As she left, she wanted to kick herself.

———

 

**That night**

Janeway fell asleep that night, less because she followed Tuvok’s advice and more because of the bone-deep exhaustion that even Starfleet captains felt when they’d been awake for sixty hours straight. She slept, but her dreams were restless, heightening things that her waking self did not want to think about to sharp points of nauseating anxiety that made her toss and turn.

There were her mother and sister during that one three-minute live-link they’d had before the MIDAS array exploded, ending Operation Watson and severing Voyager’s tenuous connection to Starfleet once more. Her mother and sister had seemed to her strange and old. They’d asked bizarre, uncomfortable questions, made awkward remarks. In the dream, there was no preamble and no time for Kathryn to react. It was a constant, ugly, taunting refrain—

“You’ve cut your hair?”

“So, 30,000 light years in seven years. After all, that’s quite something, isn’t it?”

“Are you eating okay? You look skinny.”

“What do you do for fun out there?”

“I was so sorry to hear about Mark, Katie.”

“But does it not get claustrophobic?”

She wanted to scream that she hadn’t had long hair in four years, and had never missed it, that she hadn’t thought about Mark in years either, but that she had moved in with a man, recently, when she had had forgotten herself, and that, now that she'd remembered, she could do nothing to dispel the image of her first officer looking at her, full of sympathy and longing, when he hadn’t looked like himself and she hadn’t known who she was.

She felt she couldn’t say any of those things and gritted her teeth against the sudden urge to weep.

Then, mercifully, the dream shifted, swirled, and softened.

She was sitting with Chakotay on the sofa in her quarters, late one evening. They were sipping coffee and plotting what they should do in the case of Voyager’s eventual return home.

“—do appreciate it, but I know I speak for all the Maquis when I say you don’t owe us anything.”

“You sound like Admiral Hayes, telling us to inform them of ‘the status of the Maquis’,” she bristled.

“Telling you, you mean. I doubt the admiral would appreciate you enlisting me to help draft your response.”

“Well. Then again they might have me court-martialled right along with prosecuting you.”

It was a throwaway line, but he looked serious. “They might. But I doubt they would.”

“And so you’ve decided I should abandon you?”

“Look, Kathryn, may you expect Starfleet to act either like we’re all one and the same or as if the ‘Fleet were a natural extension of you. But I don’t.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Only that I believe the ‘Fleet will do as they see fit, and that I can’t see how you jeopardizing your career would benefit anyone.”

“I won’t let— I will play no part in breaking up this family.”

He sighed, but said nothing. They were arguing over hypotheticals in any case. And yet … She held his gaze, and the look he gave her was warm and wise, free of guile.

She’d realised, then, how right he was. She had, for seven years, been a Starfleet captain in name only. She had taken no orders, had had no communication with the ‘Fleet. For all her fear of Voyager losing its sense of duty, its identity as a Starfleet ship, she had to admit that it had, above all, been her moral compass she had been careful to preserve: the spirit, not the letter, of the law. From that first fateful decision that had stranded them in the Delta Quadrant — which Starfleet might very well interpret in the same way Tuvok had, as a violation of the Prime Directive — she had taken Starfleet protocol as a guideline rather than a set of iron-clad rules.

Now that she had spoken to the admiral, she felt boxed in. She strained against his commands, felt defiant. Some part of her, a part that she wasn’t proud of but that was undeniably there, didn’t altogether consider him legitimate. She felt estranged from her mother and sister, estranged from the ‘Fleet.

She did not, however, feel estranged from the man sitting next to her. What was more, he was devoted to her, had told her, many times over, that he would follow her anywhere. Her, Kathryn Janeway. Not Starfleet, its rules and regulations.

In the dream, what she did next felt logical and right, as natural as breathing. In reality, her heart had pounded, and she had felt unsteady, a little sick to her stomach. Even in the split second before her hands had touched either side of his face, she had almost pulled away.

Then she kissed Chakotay’s lips, lightly but surely. When she drew back, he looked stunned.

In reality, what had followed had been full of hesitation. There had been false starts, awkward pauses and many, many difficult questions. In the dream, she simply sank into his arms, and then they found themselves in her bed, seamlessly, without fumbling with each other’s uniforms, without the nervousness that had accompanied the crossing of the threshold to the bedroom.

His arms were strong, his chest solid, and their legs intertwined with each other and the sheets. In the dream, everything felt soft, velvety smooth and whole, and she wanted it to last forever.

“Kathryn,” Chakotay said in a reverent whisper.

When he entered her, she moaned with pleasure and when she came, the release, the elation, was such that she had to surreptitiously wipe away a tear from her the corner of her eye.

“The time is 0530 hours,” the computer said.

Janeway jolted awake. As the computer automatically brought the lights up to seventy per cent, her awareness returned to reality.

It was morning, or what passed for it on Voyager. The morning of the day the Doctor had said he was going to wake Chakotay.

With a sigh, she left the bed, and with it her soft dream-world, for the bathroom.

It was time to face the day.

 

———

 

TBC


End file.
